"The Tales of Hoffmann" was Offenbach's attempt to conquer the world of serious opera after a long and lucrative career spent writing ebullient comic operettas. The new production that opened the San Francisco Opera's summer season on Wednesday night, in a forceful performance boasting a first-rate cast, takes the composer at his word.

There are bursts of humor scattered throughout the evening - they could scarcely be avoided - but the predominant thrust of director Laurent Pelly's production is to underscore the work's dark, demonic character. Never mind the ardent lover or aspiring aesthete who sometimes occupies center stage in this piece - the Hoffmann who spends a long evening cataloging his amorous travails this time is a tortured soul with one foot already poised on the path to the afterlife.

It's a legitimate position, and one that's in keeping with the image of the real-life writer E.T.A. Hoffmann that comes down to us through his spooky stories and proto-Romantic criticism. And if this is a weightier, more somber "Hoffmann" than many - certainly more so than the brilliant and buoyant 1996 production directed by Christopher Alden that marked the company's previous staging - the musical vigor and theatrical precision on display in the War Memorial Opera House made the case for it.

Any way you approach it, "Hoffmann" argues for the sublimation of psychic trauma into art. The title character, a hard-drinking poet, has plenty of that, thanks to his apparent penchant for falling deathlessly in love with the wrong girl again and again.

Drinking buddies

As he regales his drinking buddies (and us) with the details, we meet each of these in a separate act: Olympia, who turns out to be nothing more than a mechanical doll; the doomed tubercular singer Antonia; and the heartless Venetian courtesan Giulietta. Fate, in the person of a malignant antagonist with a spooky musical signature, always seems to intervene, and in the end Hoffmann is left to the ministrations of his muse - who has accompanied him all along in the guise of a young student, Nicklausse.

Because Offenbach died before quite completing "Hoffmann," the work has long been a welter of competing versions - some of them defensible from one position or another, some manifestly wrong. This production is based largely on a scholarly edition by Michael Kaye and Jean-Christophe Keck, with some interpolations by dramaturge Agathe Mélinand; it restores several vocal numbers that are often omitted and makes the narrative frame - the prologue and epilogue surrounding the main three acts - even sturdier than usual.

Pelly's staging, with dark-hued sets by Chantal Thomas based on the work of the Belgian symbolist painter Léon Spilliaert, took a while to locate its dramatic momentum - the prologue seemed especially inert - and Patrick Fournillier's conducting, though robust, was short on rhythmic profile. But by the middle of Act 1, the expansive and persuasively serious character of the undertaking had begun to take shape.

Demonic energy

On opening night, tenor Matthew Polenzani threw himself into the title role with a wondrous combination of vocal clarity and demonic theatrical energy. Soprano Natalie Dessay was originally scheduled to sing all four of the female leads (including the actress Stella, who makes a brief appearance in the epilogue). But she whittled her assignment down to Antonia alone, singing it adroitly but with some worrisome strain at the top.

The other women fared better. Soprano Hye Jung Lee, coming off last year's exciting Madame Mao in John Adams' "Nixon in China," dispatched Olympia's glittering vocal roulades with ferocious precision and grace - and did it while swooping through a downright gymnastic staging. Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts gave a fine, tonally resplendent company debut as Giulietta, and Adler Fellow Jacqueline Piccolino's Stella came as a burst of pure vocal majesty at evening's end. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was a commanding, big-voiced villain, bringing an air of suave menace to his Act 3 aria, "Scintille, diamant."

But the real triumph of the evening was the company debut of mezzo-soprano Angela Brower as the Muse and Nicklausse, in a phenomenal display of dramatic power and lush vocal prowess. Brower was a late replacement for the great Alice Coote, but this was no second-best contribution. Here's hoping for her swift return to San Francisco.

The rest of the large cast included a number of fine contributions, particularly Steven Cole's funny series of character tenor bits, James Creswell's ardent debut as Antonia's father, Crespel, and Thomas Glenn's turn as the mad scientist Spalanzani. The singers of Ian Robertson's Opera Chorus acquitted themselves admirably throughout.